Something tasty for the new year? Made with Marmalade!

First post of the year! Yeah! So how should we start off the year? If I were to make a prediction, I might be tempted to call this year, the "Year of the Device." We now have some very high quality devices from all the major players, the app stores continue to go and devices are nor must have. And I'd bet that we're going to see the device battle heat up even more this year!

So what's a dev to do? We have all these devices, all with their own IDE's, SDK's, capabilities, languages and such. How do we get our apps on them without rewriting them for each? And it becomes even harder when we're building games or highly interactive, graphic intensive apps (read "need native level code"). We need a cross platform SDK that helps us build native apps for all the devices.

Today's post highlights one such SDK that's new to the Windows Phone 8 space, and while not free, has a tasty name (and of course some very interesting looking features!)...

Marmalade supports all open native operating systems

Marmalade uniquely provides the opportunity of deploying simultaneously to all platforms without compromising on performance. Marmalade’s patented technical architecture builds your application as a portable code binary containing native CPU instructions. All this is possible with a single click for the following operating systems (our ‘Supported Platforms’):

iOS (4.2 and above)

Android (2.1 and above)

BlackBerry PlayBook OS

bada (2.0)

Windows desktop (7, XP3)... full-screen and windowed applications

Mac OS X desktop... full-screen and windowed applications

LG Smart TV (for Professional licensees and LG registered developers)

Marmalade does not support the BlackBerry Java platform.

We are also working closely with leading device manufacturers to create new distribution opportunities for Marmalade content.

Marmalade supports all devices within each operating system

Marmalade fixes fragmentation within each operating system by removing the need for developers to worry about individual device eccentricities. Here are just five examples, among hundreds, of things that Marmalade handles in the same way across all devices:

Dynamic portrait/landscape screen switching

Accelerometer API – despite the large number of bespoke device drivers and APIs in the market

Device-application inter-operability – in other words, your application is guaranteed to 'play nicely' with the device software, for example to respond to incoming phone calls and messages

Audio – by providing advanced software sound mixing, for example

Drawing API – supports OpenGL ES 1.x, OpenGL ES 2.0 and super-fast software rendering, allowing your app to run with or without any form of hardware graphics acceleration

Marmalade is the only cross-platform SDK that lets you deploy OpenGL ES 2.0 based applications on Windows Phone 8. And with Marmalade Plus, you can start developing in one place for Windows Phone 8, iOS, Android, BlackBerry 10, LG Smart TV, and Mac & Windows desktops.

If you purchase the new Marmalade Plus license now, we can offer it to you at advanced pricing of just $1200 per License, a 20% discount on the normal price.*

As I said, there's no free version, but the first tier that support Windows Phone 8 will be the Indie tier...

That said, there are ways to make it cheaper and maybe even free...

Marmalade offers an open, scalable and highly flexible environment for developing mobile apps. Create or port rich content faster using efficient desktop tools - and distribute your apps to most mobile operating systems and smart devices. If you join our Apps Program or Code Community projects you could get your license free of charge.

If you are a student or would like to use Marmalade for educational purposes, please Contact Us to find out how we could help.

This looks like a interesting and cool way to build very high performance cross platform apps and is something I'll be keeping an eye on.

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